Griffiths beware of video nasty replay

AFTER Warrington's last match, Brian Johnson removed an oblong box from his coat pocket and looked at it with a wry mixture of trepidation and distaste. Well he might; it was the unforgiving taped record of the worst 80 minutes in the history of the the club. St Helens scored a point for every minute of the Regal Trophy semi-final last Thursday night, and the cassette went far beyond a video nasty.

"I don't know whether I can stand to watch it," Johnson said. In fact, he had already made a decision that made his viewing of it academic. After 17 minutes of the game when Warrington went 24-0 down, he knew he was going to resign the following morning.

By a splendid quirk of the fixture list, the first game in charge for his successor, Clive Griffiths, takes the Wire back to Knowsley Road today in a league match that would have been meaningless but for what happened three days ago. Griffiths's problem has been to convey to his side just how inadequate their performance was without entirely destroying their confidence.

For St Helens it will be their last game before the Regal Trophy final against Wigan. It will give their coach, Eric Hughes, the chance to resolve some problems that the game threw up - although his task is far more palatable than Warrington's.

Thursday's victory was achieved without a number of first-team regulars, notably the world's most expensive player, Paul Newlove, their leading try-scorer, Anthony Sullivan, and arguably Britain's best forward over the past couple of months, Chris Joynt.

Two, or even all, of those players are likely to be fit for the final at Huddersfield, but it will be hard to leave out players such as Andy Northey, Danny Arnold and Ian Pickavance, all of whom played magnificently in the semi-final. "None of the missing players could have done more than the lads who came in," Hughes said. "They have given me some selection problems."

The case of Northey is particularly intractable. A modest signing from Waterloo rugby union club a little over a year ago, he is clearly cast as the odd man out when both Newlove and the higher-profile convert Scott Gibbs are fit. But it would be very difficult to drop him on current form. Not only did he spearhead the assault on Warrington with three tries on Thursday, he is also a rugged defender who made an important contribution to Saints' uncharacteristic refusal to concede any points.

Northey, as Hughes points out, has had to learn quickly, although he has a background in the game, via his father, Ken, a Saints player in the Sixties. "We don't have the luxury, like Wigan do for instance, of being able to bring new players through slowly," Hughes said. "The signings we make have to be successes."

Northey has made it as a centre, but he is rough and tough enough to be an equally useful loose forward. The trouble there is that Saints have Joynt and their signing from Hull, the rapidly improving Dean Busby.

How to accommodate all his indispensable assets is Hughes's headache over the coming week. But that is nothing compared with how Johnson must feel.